“I’M NOT a photographer really, I’m more of a painter,” Harriet Leander declares as she shows me round the photographs which comprise the greater portion of her new exhibition, Waste Beauty, at the Galway City Museum.
Yet the images along the wall emphatically refute her modest disclaimer. Leander’s astute eye and skilfully deployed lens create striking combinations of colour, texture, and form that are visually arresting and surprisingly beautiful.
I say ‘surprisingly’ because the subject matter seems a highly unlikely one in which to find any kind of beauty. These are images of the mountain of scrap metal on Galway docks. Through the alchemy of her art, Leander transforms these rusting, twisted piles of base metals, into aesthetic gold.
There is a dramatic interplay of colour in, for example, the way a vivid splash of orangey-red rust sets off the bright silvery gleam of a sheet of metal. It’s also worth noting that Leander has used hardly any artificial manipulation of colour to achieve these photographs’ effects. The textures and shapes are just as compelling as the colours, and the images often seem to take on the quality of abstract paintings.
Interestingly, over the two years or so during which Harriet was taking the photographs which have gone into this show, she was fascinated to discover similar patterns and shapes emerging from her prints as had previously defined her paintings.
There are a number of paintings in the exhibition and even though several predate the photographs, we can clearly detect a stylistic and thematic continuum running through all the work.
As Harriet herself remarks: “I started as a painter and have used oil as a medium for many years; abstract painting is what you don’t see but feel, and seeing abstract patterns in the rusty metal made me revise my ideas again, a healthy thing to do.
“I am not a photographer, but I used the camera as a tool. It led to a new vision and I enjoyed discovering the slow decay that gave my abstract painting a new meaning. Recycling and giving a new life to things seemed to be a solution at the same time as it made me think in a new creative way.”
The recycling element is present in a number of playful sculptures Leander has created from things like old Guinness cans and which serve to affirm her belief that art should have a fun side along with its aspirations to being ‘deep and meaningful’.
She also makes a point of acknowledging the considerable support she received from local businesses and private individuals whose contributions enabled her to meet the exhibition’s costs of over €2,000. In these straitened economic times such support is all the more welcome.
“Waste beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” Leander declares, and thanks to her artistic sensibility and skill, she enables viewers of the exhibition to share her perspective and behold that beauty for themselves.
The exhibition continues at the Galway City Museum until May 10.
